Students rethink Hippodrôme site from the ground up

Marian Scott, The Gazette08.27.2013

The Hippodrôme project will affect the urban environment for all Montrealers, says Concordia University professor Pierre Gauthier, looking over student projects with Shih-Jen Jou, second from left, Bilal Jamaleddine and Dana Dadoush.

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MONTREAL - From bustling village squares to green roofs, ideas on how to create a sustainable, family-friendly neighbourhood abound in proposals for the former Hippodrôme site by students at Concordia University.

Pierre Gauthier assigned his third-year urban planning students to produce master plans for the 43.5-hectare site near the Décarie Expressway and Jean-Talon St. last term. The projects, by six teams of students, offer a primer on planning principles the city should heed if the Hippodrôme is to live up to its billing as an international model for new development.

1. Break down silos

Too many projects are planned in isolation, without a coherent overview of how they will fit into the urban environment, the Concordia students say.

When issues like regional transportation are involved, the different levels of government and transit agencies need to be part of the discussion.

“I think what’s missing is these are all separate islands,” said Gosia Buk, 36, who has an MA in art history from University of Warsaw in Poland and will graduate from Concordia’s urban planning program in December.

“They’re designed without taking into consideration the city context at all,” she said. “They’re investments, quick condo sales. This is the problem. There’s no big picture in it.”

Before making design decisions, it’s important to view the site holistically, said Bilal Jamaleddine, 21.

“We spent more time thinking about how it would work as a whole than what we were going to throw on the site,” he said.

How is the site linked to neighbouring districts? What barriers exist? What are the needs of current area residents? What transportation links serve the site? How do sun and wind affect it? What environmental problems — like pollution, traffic and noise — need to be solved?

2. Turn challenges into opportunities

Good projects correct the urban-planning mistakes of the past; bad ones reinforce them.

The Hippodrôme site has many downsides, mostly caused by the Décarie Expressway, inaugurated in 1967. It’s a pedestrian-unfriendly environment with dangerous intersections, traffic congestion, truck traffic, noise and pollution. The desolate setting includes an industrial park, big-box shopping centre and Walmart store. Railway tracks hem in the site on the north, west and south sides, while the Décarie cuts it off from Côte-des-Neiges on the east.

“It’s ugly. It’s scary, chaotic,” Dana Dadoush said of the Décarie/Jean-Talon intersection. Dadoush, 23, has graduated and plans to become an urban planner in Dubai.

“We called it ‘the death square,’ ” Jamaleddine agreed. But the site’s drawbacks are not insurmountable, he noted.

“Even if it’s something that might be looking ugly, we can turn it into an advantage,” Jamaleddine said. “We can use the constraint and turn it into an opportunity.”

For example, the students proposed covering a section of the Décarie and reconfiguring the expressway’s access ramps to route trucks out of the neighbourhood.

“We covered up the highway,” said Shih-Jen Jou, 27, a recent graduate who is looking for a job in urban planning. “It serves as a buffer for the noise and pollution, but at the same time, in the future, we want to attract people from the Triangle (a nearby condo development) to come here and shop on our local commercial streets.”

3. Focus on transportation

Transportation shapes the built environment and influences how people live. In the area around the Décarie Expressway, the car is king. That must change if the goal is to create a pedestrian-friendly neighbourhood with a vibrant street life.

The students’ proposals emphasize the site’s proximity to the Namur métro station. One proposal is to turn Namur into a multi-modal station for suburban trains, since AMT trains already pass by the site.

Another calls for a tramway along Jean-Talon St. to Côte-des-Neiges Rd. — a project that got the green light from the Tremblay administration and is favoured by Projet Montréal. But Dadoush noted a similar benefit could be achieved at a much lower cost by implementing a bus rapid transit (BRT) line along Jean-Talon. “Is it really cost-effective?” she asked of the tramway proposal.

The designs for the new community make it possible to live car-free.

“It’s a walkable neighbourhood,” said Mistaya Hemingway, 36, who recently completed a degree in urban planning after a career as a professional dancer.

“You can walk to get your groceries. You can walk your kids to school. You can walk to the métro and go to work downtown. It really gives a choice (of not using a car) to people where sometimes they don’t feel they have a choice.”

Those things are missing from most new developments, noted recent graduate Louise Capelle-Burny, 25.

“I live in Ville St-Laurent, and in the area I’m living in, they’re continually building condos,” she said. “There are just more and more condos, but they don’t provide anything for the people, any destinations. It’s all still car-oriented. There are métro services nearby, there are buses, but there is nowhere to go. If I want to go somewhere, I have to get on a bus or get in my boyfriend’s car. I find it’s dysfunctional.”

The students’ master plans call for a wide range of amenities — like parks, squares, a library, cultural centre, skating rink, school, daycare centres and shops — so residents don’t have to leave the neighbourhood to find services.

“We have the (sizable) population that we need in order to have a lot of services for this community,” said Kenza Diboune, 24, whose scheme included a civic square with a library and CLSC. Diboune has also graduated and is working in urban planning for the city of Montreal.

5. Foster diversity

New housing projects usually cater to specific clienteles, like young professionals or wealthy retirees. That fosters homogeneous enclaves, like gated condo projects that exclude low- and middle-income residents.

The city requires 15 per cent of new housing to be set aside as affordable housing and 15 per cent as social housing in developments of more than 200 units, but developers often locate those units away from market-price ones.

The student projects take the opposite approach.

“The whole idea is we wanted to propose a mix of all social groups,” Dadoush said.

“We contacted a few community groups and they were telling us how there was a lack of social and affordable housing, especially in Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. That’s something we really wanted to consider when we were proposing these units,” she said.

One way of achieving that is to introduce different housing, from small apartments to family-size homes. Buildings would range from three to 10 storeys.

“You do low density, medium density and high density,” Dadoush said.

6. Green the site

Situated smack dab in the middle of the island of Montreal, the Hippodrôme site is a small oval of green beside a sea of asphalt and concrete to the north and east. The proposals call for the reintroduction of natural landscapes to combat heat islands — caused by the sun hitting surfaces like roofs and pavements, raising the ambient temperature — and to create a more livable environment.

“A big part of our project was the rediscovery of a lost river, the River St. Pierre,” Hemingway said. The students proposed creating a park at the outer edge of the site, around the revived river, which had been channelled underground and incorporated into the sewer system. The green space would soften the effect of being surrounded by railway tracks, she said.

The park would be linked to a cycle path along the railway tracks that would lead southwest to the Meadowbrook golf course and Lachine Canal, and eastward to the Université de Montréal and Mount Royal.

“Our project paid real attention to an environmental linkage across the island of Montreal, looking at where the green spaces are and where there are not green spaces,” Hemingway said.

“It’s challenging, because there are so many barriers around the place,” she said. “By bringing back water and bringing green into the space, it helps people to live with those barriers. Because instead of it just being a train track, it becomes linked to a park and becomes a bicycle path.”

The students also seized the opportunity to build sustainably, calling for green roofs and even a rooftop farm atop the Walmart store at the entrance to the site.

“I think it’s just kind of laziness that we’re not building buildings that can use grey water (waste water that can be treated and recycled) and that have green roofing and that are using recycled materials and all of that,” Hemingway said. “This is just as important as being close to the métro and the potential tram line, if it ever goes ahead.”

- - -

The Hippodrôme project will affect the quality of the urban environment for all Montrealers, professor Gauthier said.

“This is a significant part of the city. In French, I would say it’s a projet de ville,” he said.

“These are big pieces of the city, and they’re not just infrastructure. They create space where people will live and work.”

The project offers an opportunity to change the way the city manages development, Gauthier said.

“Even public developments nowadays are governed mainly based on an economic rationale. And this is what we need to break. It’s a vicious circle that needs to be broken, such as in Griffintown and so on. I think we’re learning from those experiences now.”

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